Boston detective under fire didn't return crime lab calls

Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said he took the rare step of stripping an officer of his detective rank after learning that the officer had failed to return phone calls and e-mails from the crime lab testing evidence in the case of a woman who was choked until she passed out.

The suspect in that September 2012 case, Edwin Alemany, is now a person of interest in the brutal stabbing of 24-year-old Amy E. Lord, who was mourned at a funeral Mass in Wilbraham Tuesday morning, one week after she was killed. Alemany has been arrested in assaults on two other women in South Boston on the same day.

Davis has said that Alemany was never arrested in 2012 because the detective, Jerome Hall-Brewster, decided there was not enough probable cause to bring the case to a court clerk magistrate, even though the victim was found holding the wallet containing Alemany's identification card. Davis said that Alemany will now be charged with the crime.

Physical evidence, including a bottle, was collected from the scene on Parker Hill Avenue in Roxbury, and the department's crime laboratory, which analyzes DNA and fingerprint evidence, repeatedly tried to contact the detective about the items to get more information.

“He never returned their call or their e-mails,” Davis said. “There is some testing that should have been done last year that wasn't done.”